Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Amongst Things

Molly Ann Rothenberg’s book The Excessive Subject formulates a theory of retroactive causation based on the Lacanian concept “extimacy,” a sort of “intimacy on the outside.” We could quite easily extend some of its insights to non-humans and non-sentient beings. This is because objects are already within the phenomenon of extimacy. The extimate is an object-like presence that is “in you more than you yourself.” It’s your agalma (Greek), your “treasure.” Rothenberg’s own example is “Carl smiled as he gently stroked the skin of his lover with the keen edge of a knife.” [64] The end of the sentence changes what we think of “him,” retroactively rearranging the scene. Note that it’s a knife that does this—an object that is “extimate.” These clues are more than enough to imagine how to apply retroactive causation to non-human and non-sentient entities. Harman argues this precisely. When an iron bar clangs to the floor of a warehouse, it retroactively posits the warehouse floor in a certain way. That’s what translation is. For Harman, the object is like a retrovirus, “injecting [its] DNA back into every object [it] encounter[s].” [65]

Consider the phenomenon of sampling in music. The sampler translates the sound into a regularly perforated version of the sound: the preferred sampling rate is 44 000 times a second, so there are 44 001 little holes in between and on either side of each tiny piece of sample. Every sample is a translation, in that it chops a sensual slice out of an object and thereby creates another object. To that extent, causality is a kind of sampling. Thus when we observe a phenomenon, we are always looking strictly at the past, since we are observing a sample of another object. To sample is to posit retroactively. This would account for the uncanny quality of objects. All objects have some kind of extimacy stuck to them, by dint of their being samples, and by dint of their sampling of other objects. The excessive subject is simply one of a plenum of excessive objects.

Beginnings are retroactive: they involve reverse causation. One finds oneself “in the middle of something,” or as Horace says of a good epic, “in medias res”—quite literally, amongst things. This is a much more honest approach than inventing some middle object in which things appear, such as world, environment, Nature and so on. One simply wakes up on the inside of another object, amongst things. Existence is coexistence. Coexistence hollows out the being of a thing from within, since even a hypothetical isolated thing coexists with its parts. Heidegger assumes that this strange being-with applies only to humans, but there is no significant sense in which humans are any different in this regard than telephones, waterfalls and velvet curtains.

Thus the absolute beginning of something is ontologically unavailable, to any object in the universe. It is always already “there.” Since no one is standing outside the universe equipped with a stopwatch or a starting pistol—since there is no metalanguage—the beginning of something is not only shrouded in mystery, it is itself the quintessence of mystery. The origin is a dark place. Here is a contemporary example. How can we tell that global warming is happening? Because we keep wondering whether it has started or not.

Beginnings thus involve a peculiar brand of irony that I call apoleptic. We’re all fairly familiar with proleptic irony: the irony of anticipation in which we know something that a character in a narrative doesn’t know yet. Now meet its weird sister, apoleptic irony. Apoleptic irony is the retroactive irony we feel when a narrative’s ending causes us to look back differently at the narrative. The gap between what we thought we were reading and what we are now reading is exploited. (While teaching I describe irony as gapsploitation: the aesthetic exploitation of a gap between 1+n levels of signification. Which is more of a mouthful than “gapsploitation.”) What is ironic about Alanis Morisette’s song “Ironic”? [66] What’s ironic is the fact that none of the examples she gives are examples of irony. There is a gap between what the song says it is and what it actually is. Since in my view there is an ontological gap between an object and its sensual manifestation, irony would seem to be a basic property of reality, not just a fun thing that happens in Jane Austen novels.

We must distinguish irony from sarcasm. Sarcasm can be without irony, and irony can be very gentle and not sarcastic. Sarcasm is the use of double or more levels of signification to cause pain. Like when my daughter uses air quotes when she says, “Daddy, I really ‘love’ you.” This is not a trivial distinction, because there is also a distinction we can make within irony itself between a reified kind of irony, a slogan on a T-shirt kind, and a more open, fluid, hesitating irony. Sarcasm is an even more heavy-handed version than the T-shirt variety, and so it tends to fall outside the delicate system that is irony. Sarcasm and heavy irony imply a “meta” stance to things that OOO rules strictly impossible.

Irony is a system: it’s interobjective. It has to do with gaps. Interobjectivity is the realm of gaps between objects, introduced when one object puts its footprint into another one, like a sound being sampled by a digital recorder. Irony always means that something is already there. Otherwise no gap could occur. Now there are various types of irony. There’s proleptic irony, the irony of anticipation, in which a character anticipates something and the reader or audience know things will turn out differently. There’s dramatic irony in which the audience knows something a character doesn’t know. Romantic irony, specifically, happens when the narrator finds out that she is the protagonist. Now this knowledge is implicit in any first person narrative, since the I who is narrating is structurally different from the I who is the subject of the story. That’s a 1.0 version of Romantic irony. But full Romantic irony is when this structural gap is thematized. Think of Blade Runner. Deckard finds out that he is the kind of person he has been pursuing throughout the story: a replicant, an artificial human with a four-year lifespan. [67] This is Romantic irony proper, version 2.0. There is also a version 3.0, in which the entire story is devoted to this discovery. Think of The Shawshank Redemption. [68] All the way through we are led to believe that Red, the cynical institutionalized narrator, is telling the story of the magnificent, liberated and liberating Andy Dufresne. But when Red opens the box under the tree, he and we discover simultaneously that the entire story was actually happening to him, that Dufresne’s entire performance was devoted to setting free the inner Red, hence the “redemption” in the title. Both movies model beautifully a feature of OOO that Harman has linked with the thinking of Slavoj Žižek. Causation is in some sense retroactive, and apoleptic irony is thus responsible for the thrill of retroactive causation. [69]

At the end of The Shawshank Redemption, at the beginning of his “life” outside prison, Red finds that his cynicism has been collapsed. He is no longer outside. Cynicism is the attempt to find some kind of metalinguistic position outside the narrative. Irony causes entities to be joined as well as separated: they must join for causation to happen, yet nothing could happen at all if everything just swam around in glue. Apoleptic irony is not a form of sarcasm or cynical distance. It is the experience of total sincerity: of waking up inside an object, of being amongst things, in medias res. This total sincerity is the moment of birth, not as a moment “in” time, but as an event from which time gushes and spreads out into continuity and persistence, like the spreading fan of alluvial water melting from a glacier. It is to continuity that we must now turn.